Review: Cortex Command tries hard but falls short

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Cortex Command was released this month, but I purchased it in November of 2008, almost four years ago. That might seem like a long time to wait, but the indie game has been under development for 11 years. Now, even though the game has reached its 1.0 milestone, it still carries this disclaimer:

Please note that Cortex Command is a work in progress! The campaign mode and missions are fully playable, if not in a completely polished state yet.

Not what you would expect from a game that’s been under development for well over a decade, or one that’s available on Steam for $20, but this former high school project morphed into a passion project and finally into a real game.

If you’re not familiar with it, Cortex Command is a 2D physics game that pits you and your army of droids against that of the AI or another (local) player. You build a base, tell the droids what to do, and manually control members of your force as you try to destroy the opposition’s Krang-like brain. It cleverly combines strategy, base-building, loot drops, basic AI, and action into a single package, making for one of the most anticipated indie games to come out in some time.

Unfortunately, despite all that waiting and all that work, Cortex Command is severely lacking. The game falls short on many levels, but primarily its problems are rooted in the implementation. In the game you spend most of your time doing three things: telling androids what do to, controlling androids manually, and buying stuff. The purchase system works fine. There is a huge, overwhelming selection of gear, but you figure it out quickly enough. The other two duties are where the problems start.

One serious issue is with the manual controls. They have improved greatly since the earlier versions of the game, but they are sloppy and frustrating. The problem seems to exist because of tension between the physics and that of easy-to-use controls. Weigh an android down with a lot of guns, and they become hard to fly — makes total sense. The jetpack is mounted an at angle so you tend to go forward, not straight up. These are all well and good, until they prevent you from doing simple tasks.

The physics modelling uses soft, deformable ground which is a lot of fun to play with, but it makes moving around on the ground difficult. And the flying is just as difficult — it can be frustrating to simply get your character to fly up in a straight line, for instance, as opposed to climbing a ladder within your base. Imperfect controls are fine — you are controlling a body that’s not yours on soft ground — but sometimes you simply can’t do what you want to in a timely manner.

A larger issue is the AI controls built into your androids. You should be able to set one as a stationery sentry, have it dig for gold, tell them where to go, or put them in brain-hunter mode. While androids are reliable sentries, they are often stopped by the most basic obstacle, so telling one to go from point A to point B is usually a waste of a command. Sending them off to kill the enemy brain is the most complex task you can give to the AI and it often stumbles, to the point where you are better off just setting the bot on sentry duty until you can control it.

The problem here is core to the game though — if you can’t send androids to fight with you then you are left hunting the enemy brain yourself, as a single commando. This is a severe limitation, especially if the enemy has defenders in a protected position, which happens all the time. It seems to be a given that you would be the most capable unit on the field, but if your controls are hampered then this goes from a challenge to a frustration rather quickly.

The game is built around its campaign mode. This mode took a long time to get finished (Cortex Command has been playable as a sandbox for years), but it still feels far from complete. The biggest problem is that once one side is winning it’s extremely difficult for the opposition to turn the tide. Basically, after the first battle the winner gets to build a base, while the loser must attack with a smaller force. Win again and you can improve the base, adding more defenders and fortifications. At this point the attacker is stuck sending a small force against snipers, entrenched defenders, and turrets, with little chance of getting through.

Ideally the loser would then focus on another level in the map, win the battle and build their own base, but with a single pool of gold (the game’s sole resource) the momentum of winning is often too much to turn around.

Aside from that core problem the campaign is very simplistic, with no story and no ending — when the opposition runs out of brains it’s over. During the length of the match the changes to the maps (primarily the forts that are built) remain, but nothing else changes, it’s just one battle after another with some time between them to build your fort. And even this is best left up to the computer, which is able to do it without your help if you choose. Battles do not vary from one to the next, it’s just a matter of how much gold you want to spend because that will determine the size of your force.

One high point is the scenario mode, which give the player access to a number of one-off battles. These can be quite challenging and are an ideal time to experiment with weaponry and android types. They allow for more focus on tactics than the campaigns as you never have to worry about saving resources for future battles.

It’s great to see Cortex Command come this far, but ultimately it’s a brilliant idea that wasn’t quite pulled off. Perhaps expectations spun out of control, but it’s not a game that I can recommend at $20, especially considering the availability of titles like Torchlight 2. As exciting as it was to see Cortex Command hit its 1.0 milestone and be released on Steam, the game still feels like it’s in beta.